Toad Muncher

This is a game idea I came up with whilst on holidays up in Queensland. It's also my first effort porgramming a cross platform application across both Mac and Windows.

The premise is that you have to exterminate Cane Toads with you're APC, I'm aiming the game play to be something like Frogger in reverse and hungry hippo's. I'd like to have 3 or 4 players if I can get some joystick integration working in SDL.

Part of my vision for the gameplay is that you start with this really pristine environment with a few ugly toads and through the process of saving the environment you destroy it! But also you create this weird shapes, each level becomes this strange abstract art piece.

Is you look really carefully you can see some of Dirchie Karts lineage in it, playing through it again after a few years there's something still compelling about chaining together a combo of toad squashes.

Download

Player 2 W,A,S,D + ~ (Warning only use the ~ key for the menu, there's a bug that stops player 2 if you press it during the game... oops!

Screenshots

Development

It's also my first low level OpenGL project, I've used OpenGL in Delphi before but only via GLScene which hides you from all the "hard" stuff. I'm happy with how it is all looking, I'm rendering all the objects that "stick" to the background and copying them into the backgrounds texture, thats why I'm using a strange amount of the screen (512x512 texture), you can do some really cool feedback effects with this, it's actually harder to keep it steady.

All the graphics are bitmaps loaded from PNGs with and Alpha chanel modulated over a quad, this makes great use of the GPU allowing me put heaps of action on the screen, I've even snuck in a drop shadow on all the objects without a noticable performance hit.

The tracks and toad guts are also textured quads, but are rendered before the other graphics and copied into the background texture, seeing as your only rendering them once you can get away with more blending and build up a really nice messy background.